Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
A thin film transistor, or TFT, is a specialized field-effect transistor fabricated by depositing and patterning a series of thin films on a supporting substrate, such as glass. The various thin films are used to form the semiconductor active layer, the dielectric layer, and metallic contacts. Unlike conventional transistors, which typically use a semiconductor substrate, TFTs can be formed on a passive substrate, such as glass or plastic, which facilitates the fabrication of TFTs on large substrates. A common TFT substrate is glass, which is used for liquid crystal display applications, but TFTs are being actively developed for a variety of other applications as well, including low-cost sensors, logic circuits, and radio-frequency identification tags.